Lomo and HDR, Did You Just Put Chocolate in My Peanut Butter?
So, though I don’t post photo stuff as often as I used to (Entirely due to the balls chilling weather and the fact that I didn’t have a decent camera for some time), I did recently purchase a sweet little, basically brand fuggin new, Canon T1i DSLR at an incredibly reasonable price…so, well you know how it is when you get a new camera. You take pictures of your shoes and anything else, and you’ll drag your camera bag to the store with you in four degree weather on the oft chance that you’ll find something cool to take goddam pictures of. At least, you know, that’s what I do. Cause, well, cause I’m a dork like that.
So there I was, in the parking lot of Ray’s market and it was colder than penguin teat. But I just had to go around the side to a little patch of woodsies and take pictures of trees and brush and shit like that. Nothing at all spectacular by a mile. Just, you know, trees and underbrush and shit like that. This is Northeastern Pennsylvania, and though there is a great deal of natural splendor in the dense wooded, uh, woods and all…if you go out around the side of Ray’s market in Old Forge there’s mostly just a lot of fuckin underbrush. But, you know it does look at the least marginally interesting, more so in the stark environment of mid-late January.
So I took me some picatures. And I brought them home and stuffed them in my computer shoebox and didn’t think much of it.
Then, after work I was bored and decided to play with them under GIMP.
Now, you have to understand. Yeah, I’ve used GIMP for some time. However, I’m far from any kind of skilled user. I can tweak some stuff, and adjust scripts, and do basically basic shit to try and add some visual tickling factor to my photos. I use different scripts, but mainly elsamuko‘s and this bundle.
Now that I have a pretty fucking rad camera I’m going to get into doing bracketed shots and making multiple image HDR’s…in a couple of weeks, once I go and get myself a tripod. I mean, fuck, then I’ll be a photographer. Cause tripod ownership is what sort of separates the true hobbyist or professional from someone who just snaps “pics.” I guess. I mean it just seems that way. At least I know my favorite photographers use them with their HDR work so I should probably get one.
But for now, I just have been doing single image “faux” HDR using a GIMP filter script. The stuff comes out pretty good, and I know how to adjust things with backing off the saturation levels, and using Levels and Curves adjustments (So much I’ve learned from this incredible photography blog written by the gal I consider the empress of HDR). But, I’ve also got this thing for Lomography. And no, my thing didn’t arrive via the tsunami of Lomo-esque “vintaged” out iphone pics that flooded the internets when Instagram and Hipstermatic were over popular for all of fifteen seconds last year and the year previous. But neither am I going to try and say I can cop cred for actually ever owning and using a Lomo. About as far as I can go is to say I owned and used a manual film camera back in the stone age 90′s. And it was of a brand and make I subsequently discovered years later was the equivalent of a proper, sort of retro appeal, “hip” camera at the time. Fuckifino, the thing was seventy five bucks at a hock shop and it took good pictures of punk bands, skateboarders and the badlands of North Philadephia. Real good pictures actually, cause people even told me so. Probably a mistake, cause then I got the harebrained idea that I should keep taking photos. I still labor under that idea. So, you know, be careful who you say does something well, or even passably, cause they’ll keep doing that shit.
So anyway, I pull up GIMP. Throw a photo in. I fuck with it, and somewhere along the line I decide I’m going to do something I never tried before. I’m going to mix a Lomo simulation script with my single image HDR script. I did it. It came out kind of weird. I fucking dig weird. Not as much maybe as Marius, but a great deal nonetheless. So then I tinkered a bit with the color balance, saturation and lightness and it got even weirder. You ever have those moments of misdirected pride when you’re like, feeling your own gangster? It wasn’t that bad. But I was pretty stoked with the results of my experiment. There was a lot of blue to the sky, the underbrush looked all ominous and shit. And there were trees.
So I posted it to the RUREX photo group on facebook, and people liked it so I figured I’d post it here too. And, you know, tell a fuckin story about that shit. Cause that’s what I’m supposed to be doing here being that I’m some kind of friggin’ high falutin “author” now that I’ve published two books nobody reads. I mean, I’m not just supposed to be posting photos. Otherwise the same people who started calling me names like “writer” will start calling me a goddam photographer or sumpin’
Some nice photos there. I like IMG_2867 (you should name them, so you sound all artsy!) There’s real beauty in those stark scenes of decay when they’re blanketed by that cover of light snow.
Look forward to seeing what you come up with using the photos as inspiration.
writer and a photographer – you’re just greedy. You know what they say – “if the shit fits…”
Look, it’s bad e-fucking-nough people call me a writer. Now you’re coming with the with the photographer stuff. Even if the shit fits it’s not my stlye, it’s like the differece between Timberlands and DM’s. I just write shit and take pictures in my spare time. Photographers and writers are what they are, I’m just a working class stiff with hobbies.
That said, I’m going to crank up some Cock Sparrer, go over todays shots and maybe work on my next book.
Cheers!
It looks weird.
I knew a guy who was into weird once or twice.
I remember that dude.